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Realised the truth about myself and cannot handle it
Hello. I just want to get some things off my chest and I would be very grateful if someone ended up reading it. Even if you read it and think "what a whiny pretentious piece of ****", please tell me. It might be the reality check that I probably desperately need.
I'll try to make it short: the first 22 years of my life were great. Nice, supportive family, financially stable, excess to education, all that stuff. I always tried to be a good person but at the same time I was probably horribly pretentious and too privileged to be able to recognize certain struggles other people have.
I received a lot of praise and validation when I was younger and grew up under the impression that I was a pretty ok person. I never received much criticism. I was told that I was smart, mature, funny, gifted, pleasant and lots of other things. I always did well in school. I had no reason not to believe what people were telling me.
So for 22 years I had this image of myself which was mostly positive. I thought people liked me. I thought I was reasonably intelligent and gifted. I thought I was, for the most part, having a positive impact on the people around me.
Then a couple of things happened. Nothing dramatic but for the first time in my life I was confronted with the fact that maybe the idea that I had had of myself wasn't correct and it all happened around the same time.
1. My closest friend lost interest in me and became more and more distant.
2. Another person that I had spent a lot of time with very suddenly broke off contact with me because apparently I was having a negative impact on his relationship.
3. I didn't get accepted into the postgraduate program that I had counted on doing.
4. I more or less accidentally gained access to some chat history of people talking about me and found out that some of the people I had been on a team with for the past two years and that I had thought liked me did not actually like me or at least hadn't at the time this conversation had taken place.
Those four things happening in a short amount of time opened my eyes to the truth: that I am neither exceptionally smart nor gifted or likeable. And that, how ridiculous it may sound, messed me up.
I just can't handle it. No matter how often I tell myself that I am being extremely immature and petty, I can't accept the truth about myself. Neither the fact that I am not who I thought I was, nor the fact that I actually so arrogantly used to believe all that.
I've developed some extreme perfectionism. It's like I'm trying to make up for the years that I spent being pompous and arrogant. I cannot allow myself to make mistakes anymore and I question every apparent success. My trust in the accuracy of my own perception: completely gone.
The mature way of handling this would be telling myself to chill out, grow up and just do better. What I am doing instead is to constantly put myself down, feel sorry for myself and engaging in self damaging behaviours.
Because in the end I still need to make it about me: it's still so much easier to be dramatic and wallow in self pity than to actually face myself and grow up.
I am aware of all this but I still just entirely ignore it. Sometimes I wish someone would just punch me and tell me to stop being so ****ing pretentious.
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